Earthly Paradise at the William Morris Museum asks how we can ‘live radically’ inside our homes |
Long before Silicon Valley promised frictionless, universal solutions to how we live, people in the UK were re-imagining domestic life and the conditions of living from the ground up.
These forms of radical living, whether individual choices or wider movements, were born of dissent, necessity and the desire to live in ways society otherwise sought to restrict. This includes expressions of sexuality, religion, politics and identity. Some began as attempts to create households that escaped prevailing conditions of oppression. Others pursued utopian ideals or organised political campaigns enacted through the very conditions of everyday life.
What the state treated as radical was often, for those living it, the basics of a stable life and an attempt to escape oppression. Though their alternatives were often precarious and sometimes short lived.
Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, explores how people, places and ideas connect. The show aligns with author Ursula Le Guin’s critique of history by questioning whose stories get told and who tells them.
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin argues that early human history is usually told as a hunting story, centred on a man with a spear bringing down a mammoth. “That story not only has action, it has a hero,” she explains. For this hero, “the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there”. Meanwhile, the people gathering food are sidelined.
Le Guin argued that the first human tool was probably a........